Brown and orange

SIR TERRY FROST RA

Leamington Spa 1915 - 2003 Cornwall

Ref: CL 3739

Brown and orange

Signed, dated and inscribed on the reverse:

Brown + Orange / Terry Frost 57

Oil on canvas: 25 x 30 in / 63.5 x 76.2 cm

Frame size: 34 ½ x 39 ½ in / 87.6 x 100.3 cm

In a white waxed tray frame

Provenance:

Private collection, UK, purchased directly from the artist in the late 1950s, then by descent

Richard Green, London, 2008;

private collection, USA

Exhibited:

London, Richard Green, Colour Set Free – British Painting 1946-1975, June 2016, no.13, illus. in colour

Terry Frost spent three years in Leeds as a Gregory Fellow from 1954-57 and while there he developed a new vocabulary in response to the awe-inspiring upland landscape of the Yorkshire Dales.  In contrast to the bright, swinging semi-circles inspired by the Cornish coastline, paintings of the Leeds period are dominated by strong black vertical forms and brushstrokes.

Ronnie Duncan recalled Frost’s time in Leeds, as ‘one of incalculable significance to him creatively.  He has himself called this ‘the true experience of black and white in Yorkshire’.  It arose from the impact made upon him by the bleak sparseness of the North, the landscape of the Wolds and the Dales and especially the high Pennines with limestone outcrops intersected by dry stone walls running vertically over the contours of the hills.’[1]

The palette of yellow, ochre, orange, brown, black and white was developed by Frost in a series of works which included an earlier painting also entitled Brown and orange, 1955 (Leeds Art Gallery), Orange and yellow verticals, 1959 (the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) and Mars, orange and ochre, 1960 (New County Hall, Truro), reflecting perhaps the season in which they were created, evoking the warm subdued tones of late summer turning into autumn, but also the varied hues of terrain particular to the Yorkshire landscape.  

[1] Ronnie Duncan, ‘The Leeds connection’, cited in David Lewis, Terry Frost, Lund Humphries, Aldershot 2000,

  p.64.